Why hasn't T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn called up the MEDC and offered to buy the department if every dollar invested would result in a tripling of the principle in only a year's time?

Screw education spending--put it all into Pure Michigan, and then parlay that bet! Sure, for the first couple of years our kids would be missing out on school, but by year four and five, after the dividend checks start rolling in, they won't need to work anyway. Nintendo 24/7!

I work (occasionally) for a struggling company in Michigan. If the owners were guaranteed $40 in revenue for every buck they spent in advertising we'd be living on easy street.

The reason none of this is happening, of course, is that these numbers are cooked for taxpayer (and voter) consumption from a context so complicated and restrictive that Houdini couldn't escape it.

It is a sales pitch for a sales pitch.

I do believe that few states can get as much bang for the advertising buck as Michigan can. When you get very far from our state's borders most of the people you meet merely equate Michigan with Detroit. This is not a kind equation. Too many outsiders feel the whole state is dirty and blighted and think most everyone living here is either on the Synagro Technologies payroll or breaks kneecaps for the UAW.

To them, Michigan is a two industry state, automobiles and corruption, and who wants to spend the summer vacation bouncing between the sights of a transmission factory and a back alley beat down? These are misconceptions of (most of) Michigan and do not reflect its total reality, and it does benefit our tourism industry at large to dispel such notions.

Michigan is a beautiful state. This fact, among those who live here or have ever visited, is not disputed. Few other states can rival its depth and breadth of landscapes, seasons, activities and culture.

People from many states travel millions of miles each year to reach our tourist destinations and drop off points from which they can further explore the state's even more remote beauty.

If the MEDC can get Michigan's businesses $40 for every buck it spends promoting tourism out of state, why cannot Michigan's tourist industry itself spend a few bucks out of state on its own for the same proportional result?

Or, have the wizards in government stumbled upon a super efficient money generating algorithm so secret and so fragile that it cannot exist outside the confines of a benevolent government agency's lab? If so, no wonder the Postal Service, Secretary of State's Office, and Amtrak rock so hard, though in retrospect it does appear as if the $800 billion federal bailout could have been more wisely focused.

As the old axiom goes, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is, and a 200% annual return on a taxpayer investment sounds pretty darn good to me.